Greg Ballard for Secretary of State. Gary Welsh’s Death Still Unexplained & Never-heard 911 Call Released.

Gary Welsh was found dead on the morning of May 1, 2016, one floor from his own door at the Lockerbie Glove Factory Lofts. A single gunshot to the chest. A gun beside the body. No note. His wallet and phone still upstairs. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police called it a “tragic suicide” before the day was out. Three weeks later the Marion County coroner signed the certificate.

Case closed, the public was told.

It was never closed for Bob Kern.

The late CEO of this paper knew Welsh. He spent more than a year on the file before a stroke took him on March 3, 2026. Kern rejected the official ruling. He believed the blogger was murdered. That unfinished work is the reason we are still asking the questions the city prefers not to answer.

Welsh ran Advance Indiana for a decade. He hit both parties, which is the only honest way to cover Indianapolis. His longest campaign was against Mayor Greg Ballard and BlueIndy. City money moved without a council vote. Charging stations landed on street parking with almost no notice to the neighborhoods that had to live with them. The project later collapsed. People close to the story have long said Ballard once promised Welsh a job, then walked the promise back after he won, and that Welsh’s reporting helped make a third term politically impossible. Ballard left office on January 1, 2016. Four months later Welsh was dead in a public stairwell.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/c193a0_6234499f8fbc4cbfaa9c4149eb13dd4d/480p/mp4/file.mp4

Greg Ballards Critic Gary Welsh Who Died Mysteriously "Suicide" Never-heard 911 Phone Call Released

His last post, two days earlier, read: “If I’m not around to see the vote results…” Friends later said his mood had darkened. That line is real. So is the absence of a note, the phone and wallet left upstairs, and the claim, developed in our reporting, that Welsh was meeting someone that morning and opened the stairwell door when he was shot. IMPD’s public account does not address that meeting. We want to know why.

The leadership timeline does not comfort anyone who still believes institutions police themselves. Rick Hite served as chief under Ballard, reporting to Public Safety Director Troy Riggs. Riggs left in 2015. Democrat Joe Hogsett won in November. Hogsett brought Riggs back as chief on January 1, 2016—the same day Ballard’s term ended. Welsh died four months into that arrangement. Riggs resigned at the end of 2016. None of this proves a plot. It does show how quickly the same names rotate through the offices that decide what the public is allowed to see.

IMPD still treats the death as an active investigation. That status keeps records shielded even while the death certificate says suicide. We have the 911 call, the coroner’s file, and the police report that were released. They do not resolve the contradictions Kern spent his last year chasing. A free city does not get to stamp “suicide” on a critic’s body and then hide the rest behind an open-case label.

Ballard is now running for Indiana Secretary of State. Voters are entitled to ask what happened to the man who spent years documenting BlueIndy and the mayor who built it. Electing someone to defend election law while the death of his sharpest local critic remains wrapped in institutional silence is not a small thing. It is the kind of question a self-governing people are supposed to ask before they hand over the keys.

We are not a grand jury. We are a newspaper in a state that still pretends its public records laws mean something. Kern’s standard was simple: the official story did not hold, the enemies were real, and the file was not finished. Indianapolis has always been a hard city for anyone who writes down what the political class would rather forget. The least we owe Welsh’s family, and the readers who still expect straight answers, is to keep the stairwell door open until the contradictions are explained in daylight.

The certificate says suicide. Bob Kern said murder. The records are still locked. That is not a closed case. It is an unfinished one.